I reconstructed the aliases db after making the above changes and sent out an e-mail to usr1 but nothing happened.

Our emails run on an exchange server. My hudson server sits on a linux box. I tried to use sendmail to do my testing and cannot get it to work. All of the above changes are done on linux. So i'm not sure if the issue here is with sendmail/exchange server or is something i'm missing.

Make sure your exchange server is forwarding the mail for the email address in question to the mail server running on your linux box. If the mail isn't being received there, the wget command in aliases won't ever get executed.

Thanks a bunch highlycaffeinated. Yes executing wget from the cmd line starts the job successfully. As of now Hudson is not secure. I'm not sure about the exchange server mail forwarding. All i can say for now, is that, if i use sendmail and send an e-mail to myself from a linux box, then i do get it in outlook. I'm not sure how to check if the forwarding occurs in the other direction.
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BritneyAug 4 '11 at 19:26

How are you sending the email to usr1? Are you sending it from the same Linux box where the /etc/aliases is located?

To test your setup, on your Linux machine, send your email like this:

mail -s "test email to usr1" usr1@localhost

If the hudson job got executed, then your /etc/aliases setup works.

I suspect your problem could be your Linux box cannot receive emails. See if this works first before you setup the redirection in /etc/aliases. To check for incoming emails, login as usr1 and run mail at the shell prompt.